Why I Joined the Lawrenceburg Rotary Club By Neal Beard Have you ever traveled a long distance to meet someone, see a performance or attraction, visit a hyped-up vacation spot, or maybe dine at a much talked about restaurant in another city only to discover that it wasn t what you had imagined at all. Were you disappointed? Sure you were! Did you, perhaps, decide to stay and make the best of it and by staying discover something else that you hadn t expected to find? And did you, by chance, just as it was about time for you to leave, discover what you had been looking for all along? If you did, I bet what you discovered was something even better than what you had first envisioned it to be. This story is about what I discovered during my twenty years in the Rotary Club; it s about the reasons why I decided to stay; it s about my disappointments with Rotary when I first came into the club; but most of all, it s a story about why I joined the Rotary Club in the first place. The why part of my story begins in the summer of 1966. I was thirteen at the time and had just completed the sixth grade. My family and I lived way back in the country we called it the sticks. We lived in an old dilapidated two-room sharecropper s house people sometimes called them shotgun shacks. The thing that I remember most clearly about that old house was the electricity. There was a single naked light bulb suspended from the ceiling in each room by a cotton-insulated wire. A dingy-white cotton string hung down from the light socket that you had to pull to turn the light on and off. And there was one electrical outlet in each room we called them plug-ins. I remember these things vividly because I have been reminded of them a thousand times through my Rotary Humanitarian work in Honduras. It s the same basic electrical circuits that we have been putting in the homes of remote mountain villages for the last eight years but I m getting ahead of my story and adding unnecessary detail. During the spring and summer and fall, my mother and I I was the oldest child would often work on neighboring farms, usually taking our pay in milk and cheese and butter, or eggs, or vegetables, or maybe a slab of salted pork in the late fall after hog-killing time. That s how we got by. But this particular summer I wanted to earn some money to buy four things before school started back. I wanted to be able, for once, to pay for my own lunch at school instead of having to work in the cafeteria cleaning up the dishes of the other students and teachers who could pay I had done this ever since I started to school in the first grade at Old Public at least I can t remember a time when I did not. Every now and then, you would hear another student and sometimes an adult refer to those of us who worked for our lunch as white trash. Those words hurt a lot. It was a cruel and unfair remark.
I also wanted to buy some new clothes and shoes. After six years of being made fun of for my dig-store clothes and leather high-top brogan shoes some of the kids called them clodhoppers I was determined to wear clothes just like the other kids wore. And the fourth thing and this is the hardest part to tell and the most embarrassing I wanted to buy some boy s underwear. You see the seventh and eighth grade kids always dressed-out to go to the gym and I simply could not bear the humiliation of being the only boy in the locker room with no underwear. Daddy didn t think boys needed underwear and he wasn t about to waste any money on them and you couldn t find boy s used underwear at the dig store. As it turned out, the fourth item was the only one that I was able to acquire. Whenever Daddy found that I had money put back, he would take it away. But here I am drifting away from my story again memory makes us do that sometimes doesn t it? So early one morning I got on my bicycle made from scrap parts and headed off towards town stopping at every home along the way where there was someone at home and asked them if I could mow their yards to earn some money for school. After three days, and what seemed like a thousand noes, I finally got six yeses six yards that I mowed for the rest of that summer. But no matter where I went, whether to help work on a farm or to mow grass, I had to travel down this short and narrow dirt road that connected the main road that I lived on with another one a little further north where most of my customers lived. I always looked forward to going down that road because the prettiest woman in our community, maybe even the entire county, lived alongside that dirt road. I can still see her today just as vividly as I did back then. She was tall and usually wore long dresses or skirts. She had dark hair, wore dark framed glasses, and smiled a lot. I imagined that she was beautiful and smart and kind. I would always be in a hurry whenever I left home to get to that dirt road. When I got there I would slow down and sit back on the seat, peddling slowly while I watched ahead on the right where she lived hoping that I might get a chance to see her. As luck would have it, she was often outside working in the yard or going to or walking from her car whenever I passed by. She must of had exceptional hearing because whenever I would come alongside her driveway she would hear me, turn towards me, and smile and wave. I would smile and wave back and then I would start pedaling just as fast as I could to get away before she could speak to me. I was shy!
As I rode away, my heart beating ninety-miles-an-hour, I would smile to myself inside, happy that someone as nice as that lady had even noticed that I existed at all and that she had smiled and waved at me. But, before I was even out of her sight, I could feel a dark cloud starting to come over me and I would start to feel sad. You see, there was something wrong with that lady she couldn t walk right. At first I thought that she had had an accident, maybe she had a broken leg. She didn t walk with crutches, though sometimes she did have a cane, so I thought she must be improving. At church on Sundays, I would pray for her and ask God to make her well soon. But as the days turned into weeks and those weeks slipped into months it seemed she never got any better at all. Before I knew it, the summer was over and I was back in school. Then I began to see her at school. Sometimes whenever I looked out our classroom window which was often I would see her pull up in front of the school. She would get out of her car, open the back door and take out an armload of books or a brown grocery bag or a box of something and start walking towards the door. Sometimes I would see her at the end of the hall coming in or going out of the big double doors. Sometimes the school principle or an eighth grade student would ask her if they could help her carry her load or open the door for her. She would always tell them no, that she could manage just fine, and say thank you anyway. One day when I walked into the library I saw her sitting at a low table with two stacks of books separated by a card index file. She was checking books back in she was a school volunteer. As I passed by the table, she looked up at me and she smiled and waved. I smiled and waved back and quickly moved on. I went to the closest shelf, took the first book my hand came to and carried it to the farthest table away from her as I could get. And I sat down so that I could see her over the top of my book and pretended to read. But that morning I saw something that I had never seen before. I thought I saw two shiny metal rods peeking out from under the hem of her long skirt that were attached to the sole of her shoe. At least in my memory that s what I think I saw. But the most important thing is that at that moment I realized that the pretty lady would never walk right again she had polio and I started to cry. I cried for two reasons. Of course, I was sad because I knew that there wasn t anything that could be done to reverse the effects of polio. But I was also crying because I was angry. Angry that there was nothing that I could do to help her, angry that my prayers had never been answered, and angry with God for allowing something so cruel to happen to someone as nice as her. As I sat there, wiping the tears from my cheeks and eyes with the back of my hand whenever I thought no one was looking, I began to think about how happy she always seemed to be every time that I saw her, how she
would drive herself anywhere she wanted to go, how she would open her own doors, and how she would always insist on carrying her own books and bags and boxes. She didn t need anyone s help and I was quite sure she didn t want anyone s pity. She lived each day as if nothing bad had ever happened to her at all. I decided at that moment, that if someday something bad was to happen to me like it had happened to her, that I wanted to be just like her. I would accept my fate and not let it get me down. I would make it on my own too, without crutches or without relying on anyone else for help. I wanted to be brave just like she was. Over the years, I have had lots of occasions to remember her. Now, I want to jump forward in time to 1995 29 years later. I was an officer at the Masonic Lodge and two of the other officers, who were friends, were also Rotarians Dick Hanner and Randy Shook. One Monday night at a dinning table, they began to talk about this amazing program that the Rotary club was engaged in. It was called Polio Plus. When I heard the words polio my ears perked up and I asked Dick what that was. Dick said that within two years, Rotary would wipe polio from the face of the earth no one would ever suffer from its effects again. I thought about the pretty lady from my past. I asked Dick, Can they really do that? and Dick said, Oh hell yes. Then I asked him how. He said that Rotary was sending teams of volunteers all over the world vaccinating children against polio and that when they had everyone vaccinated that polio would cease to exist. He said that these teams were giving these kids two drops of vaccine orally and that those two drops cost pennies to make. I just sat there lost in thought. Over the next few days his words kept echoing in my mind. A week later, when I next saw Dick, I told him that I would like to be a part of one of those polio eradication teams and I asked him how I could get involved, how did I go about joining Rotary. Dick said to not worry about a thing. I ll fix you up, he said. And he did, he fixed me that was almost twenty years ago and I m still fixed. But after joining Rotary, I was suddenly disappointed. You see, I found out that there were no Rotary volunteers going anywhere in the world vaccinating anyone against polio. Not from our club at least. Neither were there any teams from our district, best I could tell, nor from anywhere else in the state for that matter. The only thing our club did was raise money and pay it forward for someone else to do the work. There was a monetary goal set for each Rotarian I think it was twenty-five dollars and when the club reached that level of giving, we didn t hear much else about Polio Plus until the next year when it became time too raise money to meet another annual goal. I gave my twenty-five but I wasn t very happy about it.
I started to get out of the club but by this time there were other things about Rotary that I found that I liked mostly it was the people in the club that I admired and looked up to and enjoyed being around. I still do. Back then most of those people that I looked up to were older than me. Today not so much we have a lot of members who weren t even born in 66. I also liked working at the fair and helping with the horse show. I even liked most of the Friday programs. So I decided to stay. Now let s do some more time traveling to 2006. In January of that year, five of us in the club travelled to Honduras to serve as volunteers with members of the Franklin Noon and Spring Hill Rotary Clubs on a humanitarian project Polly Marsh, James Johnston, Charlie Brewer, John Pillow, and me. We were helping to build a water distribution system, drill a water well, and install electricity in each home of a remote mountain village. In addition to the water and electrical projects we bolted on a couple of small projects of our own: Polly had collected books and school supplies and art supplies to present to their little one-room elementary school. John Pillow and a few other Rotarians had collected baseball and soccer gear to give to the children for recreation. We really got a lot of personal satisfaction from those two things. That trip to Honduras changed my life; I think it changed all of our lives. It was the first time, to borrow a phrase from Bert Spearman who went with us on two other occasions in the years ahead, that I finally felt like a Rotarian. After eleven years in the club I was doing what I had originally hoped to do when I joined I was a volunteer on a humanitarian service project. It wasn t a polio eradication project but it was just as good as one, maybe even better. It was while I was on that project that I realized just how important the Rotary Foundation was. During all the years that I had been in the club, I couldn t imagine how my twenty-five dollars here or my hundred dollars there could possibly make much of a difference in the world. The Rotary Foundation couldn t possibly tell whether I had given or not. But I was wrong. You see, in Honduras, five American dollars could change someone s life, twenty-five dollars could change a family s life, and for a hundred dollars we were able to wire two family s homes with electricity. Small amounts of money did make a difference. The following July, I stepped up to the club president s position. One of my goals was to get our club to a one hundred percent Paul Harris Fellowship status. It was a daunting task we had around 83 members at the time and 29 of them were not Paul Harris Fellows. We did several creative things to help those who were not Paul Harris Fellows to get there and by the end of August that year we made it. That September, officials from the Rotary Foundation and the District came down and presented us with our 100% Paul Harris Club banner.
There was one special person not a member of our club that I wanted to give a Paul Harris Fellowship to. I waited until the fair was over and things had settled down, and one day I called that pretty lady from my childhood and asked her if she would come to our club meeting on a particular Friday a few weeks from that day. I told her that we wanted to present her with a Paul Harris Fellowship she knew what that was. I told her that we wanted to recognize her as a survivor of polio. I told her that I wanted to remind folks that the Polio Plus program was important and that polio touched real people s lives, people that we knew. She said yes that she would come. And when that Friday came, Rotarian Todd Tingle and I presented her with a Paul Harris Fellowship. That pretty lady from my childhood was Todd s mother Peggy Tingle. But I wasn t exactly truthful with Mrs. Tingle. I had a personal motive, a selfish reason for presenting her with that award and for inviting her to the meeting that day. You see it was my way of saying that I was sorry. Sorry that I wasn t able to help her years ago when I was a child. Sorry that my prayers were never answered. Sorry that Rotary wasn t there with their Polio Plus campaign when she contracted that crippling disease. Sorry that there was no vaccine available when she was younger. It was also my way of saying thank you for being a role model and an inspiration to me all these years to me, she was still a symbol of courage. But of course, I never said any of those things to her. As a matter of fact, this is the first time that I have ever told anyone this story. Being a member of an organization like Rotary, or for that matter any project or cause or even a marriage, is a lot like the analogy of travel at the beginning of this story. Your imagination will tell you one thing, your experience will tell you another. There will be times when you are disappointed and want to quit. But if you stick with it awhile you ll find things that you really like a lot. And if you stick with it long enough, you might just discover what you had first imagined and longed for and it might just be bigger and better than you ever dreamed. Peggy Tingle helped teach me that lesson and she never even knew.